What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is the basic human ability to be fully present, aware of where we are and what we’re doing, and not overly reactive or overwhelmed by what’s going on around us. While mindfulness is something we all naturally possess, it’s more readily available to us when we practice on a daily basis. Whenever you bring awareness to what you’re directly experiencing via your senses, or to your state of mind via your thoughts and emotions, you’re being mindful. And there’s growing research showing that when you train your brain to be mindful, you’re actually remodeling the physical structure of your brain.
Jon Kabat-Zinn created the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program to help people handle their stress in a helathier way. He then started training a whole of health professionals and coaches in this MBSR method that became so popular around the world.
Integral Mindfulness is standard mindfulness combined with many of the breakthrough insights of a leading-edge model generally called "Integral Theory and Practice" designed by Ken Wilber.
For whom?
My corporate clients are individuals or groups of employees or leaders who are interested in practicing Mindfulness meditation as a way to handle their stress and increase their focus on what they deem important.
Benefits of Mindfulness practice
Improved social relationships : Mindfulness results in improved social relationships (Glomb et al., 2012). Positive workplace relationships can have a significant impact. They buffer the effects of workplace stressors, promote thriving in employees, and foster communication, creativity and citizenship behaviors (Glomb et al., 2012).Glomb et al. (2012) suggest that mindfulness promotes positive social connections in the workplace through a number of integral mindfulness processes, but most especially empathy and response flexibility.Employees who practice being mindful are therefore more likely to show greater acceptance of colleagues without reactivity (Glomb et al., 2012). Optimal functioning of organizations is, in many ways, dependent upon positive interpersonal relationships.Given that some studies have suggested that training in mindfulness may be linked to social connectedness, this highlights the important role that mindfulness may play in workplace relationships and the success of the organization (Glomb et al., 2012).
Mindfulness and resilience: A benefit of mindfulness in the workplace is that it promotes resiliency. Glomb and colleagues (2012) nominate two processes associated with mindfulness as being likely to foster resilience: affective regulation and persistence.Mindfulness helps individuals to approach others positively and, in addition, it protects them from the negative emotions and agitation of another person by regulating affect appropriately and decreasing reactivity (Glomb et al., 2012).In the workplace, resiliency is at the face of interpersonal or task-related stressors, and is also a vital part of optimal work functioning
Enhanced task performance: Mindfulness also improves task performance.The way that mindfulness is implicated in workplace performance is dependent on the nature of the task, and the contextual factors of the work… some mindfulness processes will beneficially affect a variety of types of job, whereas others are more specific (for example, for jobs with a lot of emotional content, decreased rumination and improved affective regulation may hold the key to performance) (Glomb et al., 2012).It has also been found that mindfulness is associated with fewer cognitive failures (such as forgetting, distraction and blunders) – which suggests that mindfulness may therefore lead to improved workplace performance and fewer accidents (Glomb et al., 2012).
Improved intuition: Mindfulness also promotes an awareness of ‘gut feelings’ and it has been suggested that tapping into these intuitions may facilitate improved task performance when the level of expertise is high (Glomb et al., 2012).Furthermore, mindfulness is also thought to promote better decision making, with decision biases being less likely due to attention to internal and external stimuli, and reduced heuristic processing.As you can see, the benefits of mindfulness in the workplace are many and varied.
Offer
We offer MBSR 8-week programs (as designed by Jon Kabat-Zinn) to corporates, both live and remote. We also tailor Mindfulness meditation programs to your specific needs and reality, including the 9 attitudes as defined by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Click here for Jon's video describing the 9 attitudes.
If interested, please contact us here.
